Fartsniffers are those people who think whatever emanates from themselves is golden, while they dismiss with disdain the opinions, suggestions, remarks, and other contributions of those whom they perceive to have lower socioeconomic or educational status, which is pretty well everyone but fellow Fartsniffers because the typical Fartsniffer is a rich old white man, and in our society they are perceived to be at the top of the heap by many, and certainly by themselves. Fartsniffers enjoy the smell of their own farts, in short, because to them their farts smell like roses, and reality dare not intervene with the truth.
A Fartsniffer.
The salient characteristic of the Fartsniffer is an arrogant, smug enjoyment of their privileged place in society. This helps keep other, lesser people in their place. Not all rich old white men are Fartsniffers, but most Fartsniffers are rich old white men. It’s a big club, as George Carlin said, and they’re becoming more dangerous than usual because they sense the barbarians at the gate and the loss of their rightful privilege should the barbarians get in and undercut that privilege. It would be a moment like when Dorothy pulled back the curtain to unveil the great and powerful Wizard of Oz, revealing an ordinary man, or as the Scarecrow called him, a “Humbug.”
Some institutions as a whole are Fartsniffing Institutions, such as The New York Times and the Associated Press. Not every individual operating in those institutions is a Fartsniffer, but many are, such as David Brooks of The New York Times. It’s anybody’s guess whether the culture of an institution instills fartsniffery in its staff, or whether certain individuals predisposed to fartsniffery are attracted to a like minded institution, where their fartsniffing attributes can flower and flourish.
How do you know when you’ve encountered a Fartsniffer? The whiff of arrogance and narcissism combined with a sometimes confounding stupidity is usually enough to tip you off. If that first impression is not enough, then further observation will reveal a person who feels entitled to all that privilege has bestowed upon him, and often because he claims he arrived at his vaunted position in society entirely through his own diligent hard work and incisive acumen. Many times the Fartsniffer’s assessment of his own prowess lacks objectively supportable evidence. You’ll just have to take his word for it – he belongs at the top of the heap, and you do not.
George Carlin talks about the Fartsniffers who own this country in his Life Is Worth Losing show in November 2005 at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. Warning: foul language.
When you come away from a conversation with someone who believes their opinion is the only one that matters, and that your opinion is worthy only of scoffing, if not outright derision, then you’ll know you have encountered a Fartsniffer. Don’t let it get you down. Once you know what to look for – or smell for – you can avoid letting Fartsniffers into your life, such as by not watching pundit pontificating shows on television, where Fartsniffers tend to congregate. There’s no way to avoid them entirely, since they own and run many of the institutions we need in our daily lives just to get by, but their noxious effects can be neutralized somewhat by refusing to take them as seriously as they take themselves. The Fartsniffers will be out bloviating everywhere in the coming weeks as Election Day nears; to avoid getting buffaloed, adopt reason as your shield and ridicule as your weapon.
— Ed.
Investigative journalist Robert Parry, founder and editor of the website ConsortiumNews, died on January 27 after a series of strokes precipitated by pancreatic cancer. He was 68.
Adding “investigative” to Mr. Parry’s job description of journalist gives an insight into the principles he applied to his work. Aren’t all journalists investigators in some way or other? No. Some are content rewriting press releases. Robert Parry was not one of those, and for that he paid a price in getting pushed out of working for mainstream media outlets. He would never be one of those television talking heads claiming journalist credentials while making millions of dollars for asking trivial questions of celebrities about their plastic surgeries. He came by his credentials through hard work looking into things that matter.
President Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office on November 25, 1986, with Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, Secretary of State George Shultz, Attorney General Ed Meese, and Chief of Staff Don Regan, discussing remarks he intended to make at a press briefing on the Iran-Contra affair.
Robert Parry was best known for breaking the story in the second term of President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that eventually became known as the Iran-Contra affair. The Contras were Nicaraguan rebels or terrorists, depending on point of view, who sought to overthrow the Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Earlier in the decade, the United States Congress had passed legislation making it more difficult for the Reagan administration to meddle in Nicaraguan politics by supporting the Contras. The administration circumvented the law by selling arms to Iran, a purported enemy, and funneling the profits to the Contras.
Mr. Parry also wrote about how the CIA appeared to be enabling drug trafficking by the Contras in order to give them more material support, though it was another investigative journalist, Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News who explored the story in greater detail in 1996. In the early 1990s, Mr. Parry wrote about another aspect of the Reagan years that remained in shadows, which was the possibility of a deal between Reagan’s campaign team and the Iranian government to delay releasing the 52 American hostages Iran had held from November 4, 1979, until after the U.S. presidential election in 1980. Iran released the hostages on January 20, 1981, when Reagan was sworn in as president. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election in large part due to the poor economy, and at least in small part due to the continuation of the hostage crisis.
Because of Mr. Parry’s habit of pursuing stories like that, he wore out his welcome with the corporate media outlets he had been working for, such as Newsweek and the Associated Press, and in 1995 he started Consortium News, possibly the first independent online news site written and edited by a reputable, professionally trained journalist. Since then online news sites have proliferated, which has been both good and bad for readers. It has been good for the obvious reason that more choice means a discerning reader is likely to find a trustworthy site delivering quality journalism, and bad because more choice means the non-discerning reader is likely to find a site masquerading as news that serves up opinions which reinforce existing prejudices. Add to that the algorithm of a social media platform like Facebook which ensures readers see more of what they want to see, and it’s an uphill battle for the truth.
Cover of the Kerry Committee December 1988 final report of an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics, and International Operations into the possible role of the Nicaraguan Contras in drug trafficking.
Robert Parry surely understood the maxim that we are all entitled to our own opinions, but not to our own facts. He also understood that some facts, known collectively as the truth, were unpleasant for all kinds of reasons, chief among them that they afflicted the comfortable, another maxim. And to underscore how old school was his journalistic integrity, never mind his early appearance on the digital frontier, Mr. Parry knew his first job was to tell the truth, and if that meant he wasn’t invited on the Washington, D.C. cocktail club circuit, then so be it. People like him don’t end up making millions of dollars, and don’t realistically expect to, but to the readers who valued his services he was one in a million.
— Ed.
In a surprising development, Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), Mark Warner (D-VA), and John McCain (R-AZ), recently introduced a bill, called the Honest Ads Act, that would impose the same types of regulations on internet political advertising that have long held sway over political ads in print, radio, and television. What’s surprising about it is why it took this long to regulate online political advertising, and that until now there hasn’t been regulation of the same sort as in other media. A reader of online news could be forgiven for having assumed that internet political ads were subject to regulations similar to what has existed in other media for decades, such as disclosure within the ad of who paid for it. Not so.
What took Congress this long? Congress has been behind the curve for years on technological developments, and so in this case the more relevant question is why are they acting now. The answer is presumed Russian interference in last year’s presidential election, and specifically the placement of advertisements as well as so-called news stories on social media sites that the Russians allegedly intended to influence the election results. All that has yet to be sorted out in ongoing investigations, but in the meantime it will be a positive development to have online political advertisers more openly accountable.
A demonstrator in a Trump mask at one of the March for Truth rallies that took place around the country on June 3, 2017. Photo by kellybdc.
Much has been made over the past year especially, because of the election, of the effect of “fake news” on the electorate, the majority of which now appears to get its news through social media feeds on sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Those sites have made noises about doing a better job monitoring the reliability of news sources, but ultimately they cannot effect a major reduction in fake news without entangling themselves in issues of censorship, and consequently losing user trust even beyond the drop in trust they experience when another fake news story makes the rounds.
Forty and more years ago, when there were three national television news outlets and one or more print, radio, and television news outlets in every middling city or larger throughout the country, all of them reliant on a few news service gatekeepers such as the Associated Press, United Press International, and Reuters, the daily news reached a consensus that most people plugged into. There were drawbacks to such centralization, of course, but in general there existed a set of generally agreed upon facts from which disputants could diverge.
Now the news has atomized to the point that someone with a large Facebook following can spread a story with no basis in fact, and those followers will spread the story some more. There are no editors sitting on the story until it is verified. The engineers at Facebook and Twitter are not interested in the job, nor do they seem to think it should be their job. Their job is to watch what their customers watch so that they can boost their company’s revenue by effectively targeting advertising based on those results.
It is as if a newspaper’s staff printed almost everything that came across their desks, with little or no editorial judgment on the contents, and focused most of their energies on the advertisements. A newspaper could not do that because of physical limitations on paper, ink, and space, but an online news feed has no such limitations. A reader can scroll on forever, if so inclined. It’s a buffet that the social media sites are serving up, and it’s in their interest to try to specifically please each person they serve, a task made possible by the interactive nature of the web, where each user click is tabulated as a vote in favor.
From the 1976 film The Pink Panther Strikes Again, Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau shows the foolishness of making assumptions based on limited information.
There’s only a limited amount then that the news feed providers can and should do to monitor the reliability of the content they provide. Every little bit helps, which is why it’s good news that Congress is belatedly getting around to at least subjecting political advertisements to regulations that would alert interested readers to the provenance of online political advertisements, therefore allowing the readers to judge for themselves the veracity of the ads.
Ultimately people who read news online from a multitude of sources have to exercise critical thinking more than ever before in evaluating the reliability of what they are reading. The days of passively accepting the news in predigested form from trusted sources are over, and that’s all for the good really, but it also means being on guard and skeptical more than ever, much as people want to indulge their lazy tendencies toward confirmation bias, or believing what they want to be true.
― Techly
